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Follow us Eva Mueller Honored with 2001
Carolyn Shaw Bell Award
The Carolyn Shaw Bell Award is given annually by the American Economics Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession to recognize an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession, through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how women can advance in the economics profession, or mentoring of others.
From The University Record, January 8, 2001
By Diane Swanbrow
News and Information Services
"Eva Mueller honored by AEA committee for pioneering work in economics"
Fifty years ago, when U-M professor emerita Eva Mueller received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, she asked the chairman of the department for help finding a job. "He said he couldnÕt help me, since economics wasn't a woman's field," she recalled. Undeterred, Mueller found a research job at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), where she helped to pioneer the use of surveys to analyze consumer behavior. After six years, she received a tenure-track appointment as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics and in 1964 was named a full professor.
"The struggle isn't over yet," she said, accepting the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award Jan. 6 from the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.
Mueller was nominated for the award, given annually to an individual who has furthered the status of women in economics, by several former students, along with David Lam, professor of economics and director of ISR's Population Studies Center, and Sherrie Kossoudji, associate professor of social work and adjunct associate professor of economics. "Eva was really unusual as a woman breaking into the male-dominated field of economics," notes Lam. "She was a real role model for many of us," says Kossoudji. "She was also consistent in her support for young female students. And she made us tough. 'You must do better,' she told us. 'You must work harder.' That was always her approach."
Why did Mueller go into economics back in the 1940s, when distaff contributions to the dismal science were routinely discouraged? A teacher at Smith College first elicited her interest, and that teacher, of course, was a woman.